"Science is about investigating and explaining how the world works."

This week, in my primary placement, I was so excited to see a familiar Science lesson.  I had a Science rotation the year before in my children's co-op school and remembered leading a small group through exactly the same activity.  When my CT asked if I wanted to lead Science today, I hesitated a bit and then decided to just jump in.  I remembered all of the fun of the inquiry and exploration but forgot all about the actual instruction.  The kids had a great time trying to figure out how to make their shapes balance on their popsicle sticks by placing the clothespins in just the right place.  I knew that they had performed similar experiments the day before using the tagboard crawfish, but I neglected to call upon their prior knowledge and what they had recently discovered.  I was so excited about getting the students to the part where they started to explore on their own that I didn't do any modeling or really set any expectations for behavior or noise level.  I just wanted them to get to it.
I followed the instructions from the science kit (mostly) and had them perform all of the different experiments.  I was quite pleased with myself for not telling the students how to balance their arches and triangles and letting them figure it out on their own.  However, I'm not sure how much of it will be retained.  I missed a big part.  At the end of the lesson (I knew it was almost the end because we were running out of school day) I did notice there were words pertaining to the previous science lesson written in their word bank.  I called their attention to the words and asked the students if they could tell me what "stable" and "balance point" meant.  As I collected the materials and the students got ready for dismissal, I felt like I'd robbed the students of a great educational opportunity.  They had made a number of observations and many had figured out that their counterweights needed to be below the balance point.  Some even figured out that they could balance with one counterweight if it was directly below the balance point.  I was wishing that I had asked if they had Science Journals.  I was sad to find out that they did and I hadn't taken advantage of the opportunity for them to record their observations and realize/reinforce what they had learned.  It would have been great to have them not only figure out how to make the shapes balance, but to also have a discussion about why.  If the students had a chance to sketch examples of what balanced and what didn't, maybe they would have seen the relationships between the counterweights and the balance point.

I certainly don't think the time was completely wasted.  Because this was one in a series of lessons on Balance and Motion, I think that some of their ideas from their discoveries will stick with them.  They likely learned something.  I know I did.  The discovery and exploration seems to come very naturally, however it is important to also guide the students toward asking questions, making predictions, explaining why they've made a particular prediction, recording and analyzing their observations, comparing their observations to those made by other students, and revisiting their initial question(s) and prediction.  When I read in the Zembal-Saul chapter about Scientific Explanation "the predominant approach has become hands-on activities, which can minimize the importance of big ideas and meaning making" I was quite sure it was a description of my lesson from this week.  It was definitely a strong reinforcement for thorough planning of a lesson and deep knowledge of the subject matter.

I'm revisiting this post after finishing the two chapters in Ready, Set, SCIENCE.  This sentence at the end of chapter 3 seems to make the point that I was trying to articulate above, "While children may have amazing skills and capabilities to learn science, people do not spontaneously generate scientific understanding."  (Michaels et al, 2007 p. 57).